In recent years there has been strong demand that the development processing step of silver halide color photographic materials is to be made rapid, and technical developments for making development processing short have been made one after another and introduced into the market. Specifically, there are, for example, improvements of the formulation of development, improvements of facilities, typically including mini-labs, and improvements of photographic materials.
As improvement in photographic materials, silver halide grains containing silver chloride, which allow a high rate of development, are now being increasingly used. In particular, by using photographic materials containing silver chlorobromide grains whose silver chloride content is 95% or over, the development processing step is made rapid.
In the case of color print materials wherein a silver halide having a silver chloride content of 95 mol % or over is used, since the inherent sensitivity is very low, color images less in color turbidity can be advantageously obtained, and when the color print material is combined with a dye-forming coupler whose subsidiary absorption is little in the blue region, such as a pyrazoloazole coupler, a brighter color image can be obtained.
On the other hand, the color image with subtle shades becomes flat, and disadvantageously it does not have deepness. When a photographic object having colors is shaded, as one looks at the area near the shaded part, it changes from the region where colors can be recognized as colored gradually to a region where colors are recognized as black. When this is reproduced in the above color print material, the image will be such that, near the shaded part, the region is saturated in terms of color, but the region does not change to black (there is an extinction of color gradation). This phenomenon becomes more severe when a print is made from a color negative, wherein the interlayer effect is emphasized.
JP-A ("JP-A" means unexamined published Japanese patent application) Nos. 91657/1986 and 68754/1989 disclose that one emulsion layer is spectrally sensitized to have sensitivity in two spectral regions, such that emulsion layer may have sensitivity lower than the main emulsion layer. For example, a spectral sensitizer for red sensitivity and a spectral sensitizer for green sensitivity are added to a red-sensitive emulsion layer so that the green sensitivity of the red-sensitive emulsion layer is made lower than the green sensitivity of the green-sensitive emulsion layer. JP-A No. 68754/1984 describes that preferably the sensitivity difference is 0.5 to 2.0 log E. However, color reproduction and detail reproduction are not made adequate by these prior techniques only, and in particular when a silver chlorobromide emulsion high in silver bromide content is used or gradation is made soft, it becomes impossible to attain a good effect.